One US soldier was killed and five others wounded in the flashpoint Iraqi town of Fallujah Thursday, a day after commanders said extra troops would be sent to tackle deadly attacks on their forces in western Iraq.
The soldiers had just completed a foot patrol through the conservative city when a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) slammed into their vehicles parked outside a police station on the main road through the town, witnesses said.
One vehicle was destroyed and a second caught fire in the attack which happened shortly after midnight (2000 GMT Wednesday) just as the patrol was preparing to pull off.
"Soldiers were in the blazing vehicle shouting: 'Help me'," the imam of the next door mosque, Sheikh Taleb Ali, said.
As many as 10 were stretchered off, according to witnesses. US Central Command said one soldier was killed and five were wounded.
"The injured were evacuated by a vehicle to a local military medical facility.
"The soldiers are assigned to the Third Armoured Cavalry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division," Centcom said.
It was the second deadly attack on US troops in Fallujah in just nine days. On May 27, two soldiers were killed and nine wounded in an RPG attack just across the Tigris River from the town centre.
Tension has been boiling here since late April, when US troops shot dead at least 16 protesters in two separate incidents.
None of the residents spoken to had a word of criticism for the attackers but they all ranted furiously against the US soldiers occupying their town.
"Everyone in Iraq is behind the attacks. We don't want the Americans here," said Uday Beldi Edan, 52, who lives near the scene of the attack.
"This is an insult and an occupation. The Americans alone are responsible for this violence.
"Of course, there will be more attacks. It is better for them to leave. All Iraqis will attack the Americans."
Nahaf al-Diaji agreed, warning that the US military faced far more serious attacks in the future if it failed to end its occupation.
"We have not even started attacking them yet. America doesn't respect the Iraqi people. They have done nothing for us and this is just the beginning."
Diaji slammed the behaviour of US troops, insisting that they had failed to respect any of the cultural sensitivities of this deeply conservative Sunni Muslim town.
"They don't respect our families or our traditions, they touch our women -- and that's an insult -- and every insult to Iraqis throws fuel on the fire."
Asked where he thought the weapons were coming from to launch the strikes on US troops, Diaji said: "Iraq is full of weapons, even the dust is a weapon against the Americans."
US troops questioned acknowledged that they were facing almost daily attacks amid widespread hostility to their presence.
"Every time you go out, there is a 50-50 chance you will get shot up. We just have to be real careful," said Private First Class Raymond Mickler, speaking from an armoured Humvee with a machine gun mounted and loaded.
"Some of the people like us and a lot of them don't," he said, even as some two dozen cheering children mobbed his vehicle, prompting a wave and a smile.
The reinforcements announced Wednesday by the ground forces commander of the US-led coalition occupying Iraq, Lieutenant General David McKiernan, have already begun arriving in the town.
Dozens of armoured personnel carriers and transports from the 3rd Infantry Division, redeployed from Baghdad, could be seen along the main road in from the capital 50 kilometres (30 miles) away.
"We are just here to try to calm things down," said one of the reinforcements, asking not to be named. "We just arrived but we have heard some horror stories."
McKiernan said Wednesday that 3rd Infantry units freed up in the capital by the arrival of additional US troops would be repositioned in Fallujah and other areas of the tribal belt west of Baghdad "so that they will apply some extra military manpower to these hotspot areas".
He said his forces were doing everything they could to address the cultural sensitivities of the area, but insisted that remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime, not popular resistance, were responsible.
A coalition military spokesman also said he believed that "former regime members" were also behind Thursday's attack, which came shortly after US President George W. Bush arrived in Qatar, which was Central Command's headquarters during the war on Iraq.
In a flamboyant speech Thursday to some 2,500 cheering US air force, navy and army troops, as well as some Australians and Britons, Bush said there were "still pockets of criminality" but coalition forces were "taking aggressive steps to increase order throughout the country" to make the "streets safer for Iraqi citizens."
Meanwhile, Two US soldiers were wounded Thursday when they were fired on at a checkpoint outside a bank in the Iraqi capital, a military spokesman for the US-led coalition said.
One of the two assilants was injured, possibly killed, in the ensuing exchange of fire, the spokesman told a briefing.
"In Baghdad, there were two soldiers injured at a security post just outside a bank. Two people came out of the crowd with a pistol and aimed it at their heads and injured two of them.
"I don't know any condition of the injured, they were evacuated."
The spokesman said it was unclear from the early reports whether the attack was criminal or political.
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